She was looking directly at Layne, but it took her a good half a minute to notice him: a hooded figure in a khaki jacket, standing unmoving in the shadows of the jacaranda with a sickle in his hand. She lowered the mike and put her hand on the holster at her belt. Her partner looked at her, then turned his head and followed her gaze towards Layne.
Both cops pulled their revolvers. Layne turned and ran.
Down the hill, feet slapping on the hard concrete footpath. Left into the narrow pedestrian alley behind a three-storey apartment block. Hedgerows loomed on either side; leaning in to shelter him. The cops were yelling after him, their voices ragged behind their pounding footfalls.
Layne heard his own voice intoning some rhythmless nonsense. Wings beat and foliage rustled in reply.
Layne came out of the alley into the bright glare of a service station; the stink of oil and exhaust. He swerved, scrambled over a narrow guardrail and darted across the main road. Stumbled on the lip of the kerb, caught himself. Right, and then left up a hilly residential street. The cops had stopped yelling. They were closing fast.
There were big, spreading trees in this street, and Layne told them what to do. Their limbs waved to protect him; filling the air with leaves, battering at his pursuers with twigs and low-hanging branches. Roots tore free of the ground; bursting open the asphalt; grabbing at the coppers’ feet. One of them tripped, fell sprawling. Layne did not wait to see if she got up again.
Layne’s chest was burning. His legs and feet ached. He lurched onwards, up the hill, cursing a stringybark for its failure to act with the resolution of the oaks, the conviction of the beeches. These species were strange to him, and did not take well to his commands.
Layne could not hear the gunshot over his own toneless singing, but he felt the air part when the bullet rushed past his face. He hunched lower and scrambled on, looking for cover. Here at the top of the hill the properties were better maintained; the trees were too staggered, the garden hedges too groomed to be of much help.
Layne screamed some more nonsense and a motley flock of magpies and crows swooped down upon his remaining pursuer. The cop stumbled about, yelling and waving his arms in the sudden cloud of feathers and beaks and bird-cries.
Layne kicked through a plastic mesh into the wild front yard of a building still under construction: a three-storey, heavily-buttressed structure with a steeple roof and a pair of spires. Perhaps it was going to be a church. Oaks and wattles leaned over the neighbours’ fences into its front yard, which was tangled with briar and brambles.
More gunfire. The shrieks and wing beats crescendoed as the cloud of birds dissipated, screaming and squawking and flapping. Layne turned to face his enemies, his back to the half-finished temple.
The cop came into view, following his pistol. He drew a bead on Layne, but before he could get off a round the brambles caught him. The cop staggered and kicked as thorny tendrils wrapped around his ankles, curled up his legs, and lashed across his torso and his arms. They pulled him screaming to the ground, twisting and thrashing until his joints popped apart and his skin split open.
The other cop stepped cautiously over the plastic mesh, pointing her weapon around. She’d skinned her knees in the fall and still seemed unsteady. The pistol shook in her hands. Layne was on her in three steps.
He swept past the revolver and swung the sickle, but the blade skidded off her Kevlar vest. She took a step back, grunted and tried to bring up her gun. Layne adjusted his grip and swung again. The curved inside-edge of the weapon opened her throat and the cop went down in a spray of blood. The gun in her hand discharged.
Red and blue light spilled into the yard. Layne turned towards the squealing sirens and the trees turned with him, reaching . . .
The sickle spilled from his loosening fingers and he fell to his knees. He looked down—his neck could no longer support the weight of his head. His belly, his jeans were drenched with blood. He couldn’t feel his legs.
Layne tried to raise his head as he pitched forwards, but the sun had turned its face away, and the moon had nothing more to say to him.
* * *
The department had screwed up what should have been an open-and-shut case, so they handballed it to Detective Roland Neilly.
There wasn’t any doubt that Layne Hutchings had killed all three of the victims, but difficult questions remained about how and why. That made Neilly the ideal detective for the case. Whether the department’s flakiest figured out the finer points or not, this was a case they could definitely close. Hutchings was already dead and was therefore unlikely to provoke difficulty at the trial.
The crime scene photos and the lab reports showed that Elizabeth Milan had been killed with a serrated blade. Hutchings had practically severed her head with it, and then ritually disembowelled her at the base of a standing oak tree. It was possible that there had been two assailants, since some of the cuts had been administered left-handed, but the left-hand cuts were clumsier and Neilly was pretty sure Hutchings had simply switched his grip.
The weapon had been recovered from a garbage truck two postcodes away and, although Hutchings had made an attempt to wipe it clean, they’d pulled some good prints off it. The tree surgeon’s pole saw was not the strangest weapon Neilly had seen, but it was right up there.
The second murder site was a disaster. With two cops down, backup and the paramedics had trodden all over the place before forensics had arrived. Nobody was quite sure what had happened there, but it was weird. Broken concrete, littered with fallen trees and dead birds. It looked as if an earthquake had joined Constables Benrith and Harriman in the pursuit, followed by a cyclone.
Benrith had died from a throat slash administered by a sickle. They had lifted another clear set of fingerprints from the weapon. The bramble trap that had killed Harriman was a different story. There were no springs or tripwires or nets; no evidence at all to describe the mechanism that had enveloped Harriman in brambles and then ripped him apart.
At least Hutchings’ apartment had been left more or less inviolate. The one-bedroom flat was a mess, but that was a good thing. More chaos. Neilly’s gift was to find the pattern where there did not appear to be one. Usually, he arrived at the key insight by an obscurely lateral process that he couldn’t properly explain. Neilly’s methods yielded results that were barely good enough for the department to keep him around.
It was dusty in the apartment. Books and papers and dirty clothes everywhere. Not much in the fridge or the rubbish, no dirty dishes in the sink. Neilly found a travel wallet with papers showing that Hutchings had recently been on a trip to the Republic of Ireland.
There was a heavily-annotated photocopy of a coded manuscript laid out on an imitation-Ikea writing desk in the living room. The characters in the manuscript did not belong to any language that he recognized. Hutchings had copied out the contents of the manuscript half a dozen times. His first copies were crude, but his fluency with the bizarre alphabet (if it was an alphabet) improved visibly as he went along. The third copy was close to the original. The fourth and fifth copies started to diverge again, and the sixth was completely different.
Hutchings had written in the notebooks using both hands, but everything else in the apartment suggested that he had been right-handed. Had he secretly been ambidextrous? Could he suddenly have become so? Hutchings’ penmanship with his left hand improved visibly from book to book.
What a strange individual. Neilly could barely write his own name with his good hand.
There were a couple of messages on Hutchings’ answering machine. One was from Hutchings’ first victim, Libby Milan. Another was from an Englishman named Trimby, who claimed to have new information and another contract for Hutchings. He sounded like an arsehole. Trimby had left a number with the country code for Ireland. Neilly called him up on Hutchings’ phone.
“Ah, Mr. Trimby? This is Senior Detective Roland Neilly from the, ah, Victoria Police.”
There was a pause.
“Vic
toria, Australia?” Pause. “Is this about Layne Hutchings?”
“Afraid so.”
“Has something happened?”
“Ah, yes, there’s been a . . . well, there has been an incident. Mr Hutchings has, ah . . . he’s no longer with us.”
“That’s awful news.” Trimby didn’t sound particularly upset. “If there’s anything I can do to help, Detective . . . ”
“Mr Trimby, I wonder if you could tell me what you and Mr Hutchings were working on?”
“Professor Trimby.”
“I’m sorry. Professor Trimby.”
“I’m currently seconded to the University of Dublin to investigate an ancient druidic manuscript. Mr. Hutchings is . . . was assisting us with some cryptographic analysis.”
“Druidic? As in, the druids?”
“Yes.”
“Like, the guy with the beard who mixes the potion that makes Asterix really strong? That kind of druid?”
“A bit like that, yes.”
“So, sort of, ancient tree-huggers?”
Trimby took a long breath, audibly winding himself up. “Detective Neilly, the druids were priests and warriors and judges and bards and sorcerers. They were pagans who believed in metempsychosis—transmigration of the soul—and who engaged in human sacrifice, a practice for which they were exterminated by the Roman emperor Tiberius. I do not believe there was a lot of tree-hugging involved.”
Neilly let the silence hang for a few moments, until he was sure the academic was done. “What’s the significance of this document, Professor Trimby?”
“There are no proper records of the druids. They were destroyed over two thousand years ago and they kept an exclusively oral history. Or so we believed, until we discovered this particular document.”
“Which is?”
“It’s said to be the journal of a druid named Edraghodag, but we have been unable to decode it. That was Mr Hutchings’ job, before he returned to Australia.”
“He was still working on it when he died.”
“He was? Had he made any progress?”
“Dunno,” replied Neilly. “His notes are in code.”
“Of course they are.” Trimby sounded bitter.
“In your message, you said that you had some new information?”
“Yes, some local folklore about Edraghodag. Apparently, he was under geas . . . ”
“Geese? Like ducks, but stupider?”
“Geas, Detective Neilly. An obligation set by druid gods, to be obeyed on pain of death. Edraghodag’s geas was to instruct the people in the ways of his faith.”
“That doesn’t sound too difficult.”
“It must have seemed rather mild, until Edraghodag was captured and tortured by a Roman garrison. He escaped, but not before they had removed the tongue from his head.”
“Nasty.”
“It’s typical. Many of the heroes of Celtic myth died because they were given geasa by their various gods that conflicted with other customs.”
“Alright. And then what happened to Ed . . . Edra . . . to the Druid?”
“Edraghodag.” Trimby sounded angry now. “There’s nothing else. That’s all we know.”
“And the manuscript?”
“We now believe it to be Edraghodag’s teaching notes, but we don’t know for sure. The Druids were forbidden to write, but Edraghodag was required to teach, even after losing his powers of speech. That may account for the code.”
Neilly thanked the professor and hung up. He sat back, yawned, stretched, and began to flip through the photocopied pages. He stared at the misaligned rows of characters until his eyes lost focus. Shapes resolved and dissolved out of the text, the white-space.
It was nonsense. The script showed no words or numbers, no pictures or maps or diagrams. Gibberish.
Neilly shook his head and growled. There was something hidden in there, and he was going to find it.
“Obey the law,” he said, suddenly. He wasn’t sure who he was talking to. “Obey the law. Uphold the faith.”
Neilly snorted. Geasa. Was that the plural that Trimby has used? Surely ‘flock’ was more correct?
He thumbed through Hutchings’ notebooks again. The most recent one seemed more approachable. Some parts looked almost like English, if you squinted at them. He worked at it for about thirty minutes, but it was tough going. Before long he found himself fidgeting with Layne’s fountain pen. He changed the cartridge and tried it out in a blank notepad. Neilly’s handwriting had always been terrible and now, with the fountain pen, it was also blotchy and smudged. But, he had to admit, it was fun. He liked the feel of it when he got a nice line going.
Neilly copied a couple of lines from Hutchings’ notes onto his fresh pad. They looked good. He switched hands and copied a couple more. It was all a lot more satisfying than he’d expected. Before long, he began to speak the words as he wrote them.
He wondered where Hutchings had purchased the sickle.
Shedding Skin
Angela Rega
Tonight, my skin is itchy. It burns and prickles where red, anthill mounds sprout on my inner thighs. “Ingrown hairs,” he says to me. “You’ve got ingrown hairs.”
I try to squeeze the hair out. The skin is rough and has grown what looks like a purplish lid to keep it in. It hurts but I keep squeezing until the swellings change shape from round anthills to pointy cones and a little pus and water seeps under my fingernails from the squeezing. But no hair comes. “You’re very hairy,” he says to me. “I didn’t know women were so hairy.”
I don’t answer. I stopped answering him a few months ago when I realized that we weren’t compatible. Instead I step into the bathroom, close the door, step onto the cracked and moulding tiles of the shower recess, grab my loofah and scrub my skin.
I scrub and scrub until the skin is chafed and raw, until I feel the hair coming through the skin. The bathroom is small and steams up easily; I push the window open to let the cool air in and stand on tipee-toe to see if anyone is out there getting a good glimpse of me naked. Sometimes he does that to piss me off.
The new girl in the brothel next door is sitting on the bench in the concrete yard, smoking. She looks up at the opening screech of my window; I duck my head so that she doesn’t see me. I noticed her for the first time last week. She’s got the kind of beauty that makes me feel self-conscious.
Overhead, a plane screeches; it descends over my rooftop and drowns out the noise of the neighbour’s Hindi radio program, the hoon boys’ cars down the M9 highway and him, wanting to know how long I’ll be in the shower. I suppose there is something positive to be said for living directly under the flight path.
He bangs loudly on the bathroom door, muttering about how long I take in the bathroom. “You should wax your legs, you work at a waxing salon,” he persists. “Then the hair becomes sparrow and it won’t give you so much trouble when it grows back.”
Sparse, I say to myself, becomes sparse.
I don’t answer. I’ve been waxing for years. It always grows back.
The coarse blonde hair clogs up the shower cistern. I turn the tap on full pressure and push it down the drain with my toes, so I don’t block the water flow, and watch it wash away.
* * *
When I was a kid, there was a story my grandma would tell us. She’d take the three-hour trip on the slow rattler train with big olive green vinyl seats from her home, the Northeast National Park, to City Central. I remember the smell of grease and rusty iron when the train pulled in. We’d pick her up on the crowded platform, travellers carting pillows and blankets, and she’d arrive, carrying a battered suitcase with not much in it except for a change of underwear, some clippers and a story about her childhood. It was always the same story.
“Jen,” she’d say, “You know we’re related to the dingo.”
The only place you see dingoes in Sydney is in snippets in the news about them attacking children at camp sites. You never see a stray dog in this city, let alone a dingo. But Gr
andma said they were still roaming the Great Dividing Ranges, just a few hours away, up where she lived. She said she went walking in the Northeast National Park and would sit with her back against the sandstone rocks to sing with them. “They’re the wolves of our country,” she said, “only howling, never barking.” And then she’d tell the story about how the women in our family were related to the dingo. I’d shake my head in disbelief and she’d get angry and tell the story again.
“Once a month, the men locked the women relatives up. Locked ’em up in the barn to stop ’em from roamin’ free. When I was a child, I remember being tucked into me bed an’ hearin’ me father lock me mother an’ aunt in the barn, threatening ’em with his rifle, firin’ shots in the air.”
She would use her long, skinny, storytelling fingers to mimic a gun.
“Why didn’t your father lock you up, then?” I’d ask, skeptical but reluctantly drawn into the tale.
She’d poke me with that finger gun to shut me up. “Cos the dingo within waits for the moment you become a woman. I was still a little girl when the story I’m tellin’ you ’appened. You’ll stay ’ere til the dingo goes back to the forest within youse, my father would scream to ’em behind the locked door.”
Then she’d bang on my bed head as if she was her father, banging on that door.
“They’d howl through the night, poundin’ the doors so that it sounded like a harsh wind was tryin’ to escape. But it was them dingo women. It was always them.”
My Grandma’s eyes were wide and unblinking on that last sentence and it made the thick hairs on my forearms bristle.
Then she’d tell me once how her aunt escaped. Great Aunt Daisy managed to climb through the window and jump out to the open fields. She ran through to a neighbouring farm and killed a sheep. The bleating was heard by an angry farmer who came out and shot the yellow dingo straight between the eyes. In the morning, he hollered and cried when he saw my aunt lying where the dead wild dog had been, a bullet right between her head leaving a mark like a third eye and a blood stained face. The nails on her hands were still claws and the tips of her fingers covered in white fur.
The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2014 (Volume 5) Page 49